1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to telecommunications services. More particularly, the present invention relates to capabilities that enhance substantially the value and usefulness of various messaging paradigms including, inter alia, IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS).
2. Background of the Invention
As the ‘wireless revolution’ continues to march forward the importance to a Mobile Subscriber (MS), for example a user of a Wireless Device (WD) such as a mobile telephone, a BlackBerry, etc. that is serviced by a Wireless Carrier (WC), of their WD grows substantially.
One consequence of such a growing importance is the resulting ubiquitous nature of WDs—i.e., MSs carry them at almost all times and use them for an ever-increasing range of activities.
Coincident with the ‘social explosion’ of WDs technological advances have yielded, among other things, new communication paradigms such as IMS.
IMS is a standardized Next Generation Networking (NGN) architecture that, among other things, provides a framework for a collapsed mobile and fixed services infrastructure (e.g., a form of Fixed Mobile Convergence [FMC]) in support of, possibly inter alia, the ubiquitous delivery of a wide range of (voice, data, multimedia, etc.) services to end users (such as, among others, MSs).
Descriptions of the architecture, function, etc. of IMS may be found in various of the specification documents from the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) including, for example, Technical Specification 23.228.
The need exists for an infrastructure that allows the full universe of MSs, through their WDs, to seamlessly participate in the new communication environment/paradigm IMS.